


Ongoing Droid Wars Repercussions

by PiermanWalter



Series: Army Swap AU [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Gore, Gen, In-universe racism, POV Alternating, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Republic Droid Army, Separatist Clone Army, can I make the flashbacks even worse? the answer is yes, kuiil has a backstory now
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:02:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22345312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PiermanWalter/pseuds/PiermanWalter
Summary: During the Droid Wars, the galaxy was split in half by armies of Republic droid troopers and Separatist battle clones. Long after the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire, one would reasonably expect the Droid Wars to be an irrelevant memory, but its effects have impacted the history of the galaxy to this day.(Illustrated by me.)
Series: Army Swap AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608499
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	1. Burning Plastoid

When the Droid Wars started tearing the galaxy apart, Din Djarin was too young to fully understand. He knew Kuat, the same people who made the most amazing starships, had also made armies of droids in white armor to protect the Republic from cloned aliens made by the Separatists, but nobody he knew saw a droid trooper or a battle clone in real life. If it weren’t for Holonet news broadcasts, when his parents always ushered him out of the room before live footage started, it would feel as though the war never happened. Din only knew of the war in terms of news anchors arguing about planets he had never heard of. The fighting seemed as distant and remote as the stars.

One day, a cargo repulsortrain full of droid parts parked in the middle of town. One of Din’s friends snuck into the train for a chance to look at a real droid trooper, but he claimed he was the only one brave enough to handle it. Din wasn’t going to back down from a challenge, so he also snuck up to the train. From a distance, through half-open doors of the last train car, haphazard piles of damaged droid troopers looked like real human corpses. He had expected the train car to smell like a freshly butchered shaak, but the chemical stench of burning plastic hit him like a wall. Childish hopes of rescuing and befriending a droid trooper drove him on, even though his eyes started to water. He pushed his robes over his nose and mouth and stepped into the train car. 

Seeing the damage up close shattered his hopes. Fading erratic sparks shot out of limbless torsos. The melted edges of the largest blaster holes were still burning. He tried his best to ignore the models of human faces frozen in strange shapes. Din stepped back, knocking a detached leg out of place, sending a pile of droid parts tumbling down. Ion-fried circuits crumbled and poured out of armor cracks, covering the floor in shards of metallic dust. 

Once the pile was displaced, one of the droids was still functional enough to move. It turned towards him and hissed out a burst of static, its plastoid face peeling off to reveal twitching animatronics underneath. Din ran away and told friends he didn’t see anything wrong, but later that night he cried and told his mother the broken droid trooper was the scariest thing he will ever see in his whole life.

If only.

The Holonet shut down completely. His neighbors left town in a landspeeder full of broadcasting equipment to send distress signals and didn’t come back. As day after day passed without news from the Republic army, the adults grew angry and desperate.

Surely not all the droid troopers protecting us were destroyed. The senate will send more droid reinforcements to replace them. Our droids are better than their clones. Our town is so far from the capital. We are not an important target. If we cut off all transmissions and turn off all lights at night, they won’t find us. Battle clone or not, I could take a Neimoidian in a fight. Try us, you vat-molded Seppie alien bastards.

Six days later, the clones came. Enormous hulking figures in black armor, more droidlike than droids. Everyone not ready to fight hid in their homes. His parents held him and they listened together until the blasters stopped. Then the explosions started. As homes collapsed around them, everyone ran into the streets, full of clones. Everything was so loud. The sound of his neighbors screaming and calling out for each other. The sound of the blasters kicking up huge gouts of broken stone. The sound of the clones' heavy footsteps. The sound of his own heartbeat. 

Din’s friend, who had just a week ago bragged about how brave he was, laid in a crumpled heap on the ground. The clones didn’t even bother to step over him. Din’s knees buckled and he couldn’t run anymore. As his father stood in front of the clones and yelled, his mother picked him up and they kept running. Most of the clones were distracted by the screaming and scattering townspeople, but one followed.

Half its armor had been blown off. So clones did have faces. Alien faces with big eyes like constellations. Staring straight forward with a calm smile as though seeing something great on the horizon through the bodies of its targets. His mother ran into a side alley to escape the clone and as she turned the corner, Din couldn’t help himself from getting another look at it. Blasters were fused into its arms. As they fired, the heat travelled up the red hot barrels and burned flesh surrounding them, raising painful-looking blisters. But it kept firing, walking, smiling. 

After his parents kissed him goodbye and hid him in the locked storage cellar, he could still hear it moving towards him. Tearing a metal slab off its hinges with the ease of lifting a cloth off a table, blistering and bleeding from its own weapons, with such a calm smile on its face. 

After Din shed his old life for a new skin of iron, everything he learned reaffirmed these three basic truths:

Droids are useless.  
Clones are mindless.  
Cyborgs are ruthless.


	2. Dead Vines

Kuiil spent his first salary in over 20 years on a dilapidated moisture farm on Arvala-7, far enough no one would ever bother him. Kuiil had no children of his own, so he shared the farm with ugletts too young to travel the galaxy with the rest of his clan. The children were all born into service under the Empire. Come to think of it, most of his clan was born under contract, if not under the Empire, then under the Confederacy before them, and if not the Confederacy, then under the Republic before them. 

Kuiil himself barely remembered life before his clan was pressed into service. Every time his clan changed hands, there would be whispered talk among them of how things would get better, or worse, or worse to begin with and then better again. Kuill understood that not much would change. The Republic demanded more and more exotic species of dancing girls to lure and bribe the Hutt cartels with, and the miserably obsolete cloning equipment had to be overhauled twice a week. The Confederacy demanded Verpine, Neimoidian, Arachnoid, and Colicoid soldiers, made with new equipment nobody in his clan knew how to use. The Empire demanded humans, always humans, and Kuiil wasn’t deemed important enough to tell what the human clones were used for. These were the only distinctions he cared about. Service was service, regardless the master. 

The Ugnaughts were ordered to work on gestation tank repair and calibration in between rounds of cloning, alongside routine maintenance of the facilities’ droids. Kuiil rarely saw the clones face to face. Horror stories circulated from other workers of clones born with no lungs, clones driven mad by the control chips implanted into their brains, clones realising the purpose of their creation and ending their own lives. Was it wrong to free his own clan by mass-producing these pitiful beings? Kuiil tried to ignore the question as best he could. As he grew older, he accepted there was no other way. Work is work, and if anyone should be wracked with guilt over the clones, it should be those who ordered their creation, not those with no choice but to work.

The day of his freedom came without fanfare. While calibrating an amnion concentration monitor using programs preloaded onto a datapad, a tall, dour Imperial officer flanked by two Panith Strain 86 Model clone assassins dragged him outside the facility with the rest of his clan. He feared the worst. When everyone was assembled outside, the Imperial officer informed his clan that their debt had been paid in full, whereafter they were all herded into a windowless hovertransport and dropped off unceremoniously at a spaceport.

With no money and little belongings, his clan sought employment from spacers. Many starship crews were looking for engineers, but never more than two or three at a time. His clan refused to be separated. Many offers were sought out and turned down until they eventually found a massive kilometer-long Demaris bulk transport owned by a Corellian freight crew, who hired the entire clan to maintain the ship’s manual labor and astromech droids. When the ship lifted off, Kuill felt the last 70 years lift off his shoulders as well.

Kuiil still remembered the terms of his first compensated employment. 10-hour workday per 30-hour cycle with two 1-hour breaks for meals, three days off per 10-day week. 26 credits per hour per adult, 18 credits per hour per adolescent, no work for children, plus room and board, plus extra 3 credits per hour of overtime, plus extra 6 credits per hour during rush orders, plus extra 350 credits per day hazard pay for unloading in dangerous environments, plus medical coverage for any injuries or diseases sustained on the job or as a result of job-related stress if cost of treatment is less than 180 credits, plus free pick over any unclaimed or undeliverable cargo. Contract must be renewed by consent from both parties every 60 days for continued cooperation.

In retrospect, these were astonishingly good terms considering how easily the newly free Ugnaughts could be taken advantage of. The Corellians were unprofitably generous, and the clan thanked them by doing good work. It was easy to adjust to living for weeks on a single starship, since Kuiil was already used to living in a single facility. Cohabitating with the Corellians was very intimidating. Big humans who loved to talk, and loved to drink more than talk, and loved to compete more than drink. The Corellians were accustomed to shouting right next to their listener’s face and grabbing each other by the shoulder. It took a terrible amount of time for Kuiil to realise that shouting and grabbing didn’t signal a beating soon after.

When the Corellians discovered none of the Ugnaughts knew how to play sabacc, they were stricken with grief as though someone had died. Every day when work was finished, they invited all his clan who cared to join into one big game. Life on a freighter was a vast improvement from life on a gene farm, but it was still no place to raise children. Small enough to climb through air vents and slip under most security measures, ugletts were found clambering all over the most dangerous parts of the ship, nearly getting crushed by cargo containers in the pitch-dark loading bays, sleeping on top of fuel tanks, playing a door away from the radioactive reactor room. When three ugletts snuck off the ship and were left behind by accident, his clan pooled their collective savings to buy a small plot of land on Arvala-7 for Kuiil to raise the youngest in peace and safety. 

Realising credits were useless on such a remote planet, Kuiil and the pack of ugletts stopped at a spaceport thrift store to buy clothing in all Ugnaught sizes, tool kits, and dinnerware. A few bales of mulch-fungus starter and a portable slug terrarium took care of food. The first few days on the moisture farm was a mess. Two out of three vaporators were broken and the land was less safe than advertised, with deep and convoluted canyons teeming with feral blurrgs. The first chance he had, Kuiil traded an air rifle from the nearby Jawas. The ugletts, born and raised in the gene farm, were disinclined to go far from home. It made his job easier, not needing to look for children lost in the maze of canyons, but the ugletts expecting to be punished for playing outside made his heart ache. After he traded a tame blurrg from the Jawas, he made sure to take them out riding every day. When the first uglett grew old enough to leave home, Kuill felt both proud and relieved.

When the last uglett left home, she hugged Kuiil as high as she could reach, around his stomach for over half an hour before letting go. Two days later, a rainstorm hit and the desert flooded. The flood filled his home up to his knees, spooked the blurrg, washed away the tools he forgot to put away, and damaged the ironically water-sensitive moisture farming equipment, but he chose to see it as a good omen. 

His clan was well-paid and well-treated by the Corellians, but after a life of servitude, Kuiil was sick with the very idea of taking orders from anyone else. “I’m too old and lazy to catch up with you.”, he said when the ancient holocommunicator next to his bed crackled to life, broadcasting all the ugletts he raised, standing together. “I’m not moving from this spot. Come scrape me off the floor the next time you are in the system.” Although they cried and complained and threatened to hunt him down like a fat slug, they respected his wishes. Life on a moisture farm suited him. 

Kuiil intended on enjoying his solitary retirement, but the dead silence of living in an empty home wore on him. During the storm, he deluded himself into hearing falling raindrops and crumbling rocks as the footsteps of ugletts running outside, but when the rain stopped, he could no longer ignore the fact that he was well and truly alone.

Kuill started counting days in terms of the flood. Day of the flood, he moved everything off the ground and filled several barrels with water. One day after the flood, he ventured out of his home to survey the damage and fix what he could using the tools he had left. Two days after the flood, he discovered his food storages had gotten soaked, so he spread everything out on a tarp to dry in the sun and ate the worst corn porridge in his life. Four days after the flood, he went down to the canyons to gather more water and found the shoots of tiny green plants on the riverbanks. Walking home with full jugs of water was painful. Six days after the flood, he found the blurrg hiding on an elevated mesa with two others and led them all back to her pen. Seven days after the flood, he built more blurrg pens. Nine days after the flood, he rode a blurrg back to the canyons to gather more water. The plant shoots had grown into spectacularly curling vines with swathes of flowers of every color. Ten days after the flood, Jawas stopped by and Kuiil traded most of his water for new tools, replacement parts, better food, tranquilizer darts, as well as a load of things he didn’t need, dragging the negotiations for so long the Jawas became impatient, just to have someone to talk to. Eleven days after the flood, he went back to the canyon for more water, to find most of it too muddy to use and filled with baby frogs. Twelve days after the flood, he started repairs on the moisture vaporators. The water wouldn’t last forever. 15 days after the flood, he trained the new blurrgs to get used to a saddle. His eldest blurrg headbutted the others whenever they made a mistake and was a better teacher than he was. 19 days after the flood, he went back to the canyons and found them bone dry. He gathered bundles of dead vines to use as fungus growing medium. 23 days after the flood, he packed a blurrg with supplies and rode aimlessly into the desert. 25 days after the flood, he returned home. 29 days after the flood, he left again. 33 days after the flood, he returned home. 40 days after the flood, he left again. 45 days after the flood, he returned home. 47 days after the flood, a vaporator broke down from a frog jumping into its refrigeration coils, so he fixed it. 50 days after the flood, he left again. 53 days after the flood, he returned home. 58 days after the flood, he left again. 

61 days after the flood, Kuiil found a Togrutan lady digging desert clams out of the cracked mud of a dried floodplain with a stick. She shared her meal with him and the freshly shelled clam the size of his palm tasted better than any slug. 

Arvala-7 was less empty than it first seemed. Kuiil was so busy caring for the ugletts he didn’t notice the sparse scattering of settlers across the planet. Prabhu visited once every 20 days or so with a sack of clams and roots. If she arrived during the day, Kuill would make tea, stew the roots and clams, and Prabhu would raid the terrarium for slugs and frogs. If she arrived during the night, Kuill usually slept through it, but the next day there would be a sack of clams and roots outside his doorstep. 

175 days after the flood, Prabhu invited Kuiil to her home. It was 14 hours on blurrgs across the canyons, and Kuiil felt guilty and honored that she would travel so far to bring him food. Prabhu didn’t legally own her home as Kuiil did. Rather, she found an abandoned military outpost and decided to live in one of several buildings. One other building was occupied by a family of Givin, and another was occupied by unrelated Duros. Everyone shared a meal and Kuiil suddenly realised it had been years since he last ate a meal with more than five ingredients.

Kuiil started asking the Jawas if they sold to anyone else nearby. He showed up to their dwellings with a gift of water and dried food. Usually they would ignore him, or yell at him, or shoot at him, or ignore him until he felt safe and then shoot at him while yelling, but regardless it was good to know there were other people out there. He met a friendly Rodian this way. Mergo lived in a cave to avoid getting arrested for tax evasion. He also met a human who didn’t speak a single word to him, but took Kuiil’s gifts before slamming the door in his face, then opening the door and tossing a huge bag of fresh mujas, or jogans, or oranges, at him with such force he fell over.

631 days after the flood, Kuiil found Prabhu lying within sight of her home, three blaster shots to her chest and one through her head. The complex had been taken over by a gang of Nikto thugs, who noticed the blurrg and were about to notice him. Kuiil rode away.

633 days after the flood, Kuiil returned to the complex to give Prabhu a proper burial, only to find a squad of Imperial stormtroopers outside. He was frozen in terror with the irrational thought that they were here to capture him and his clan had already been captured. Soon after, the stormtroopers and Niktos started shooting and Kuiil wrapped Prabhu in a sheet and escaped while they were distracted.

634 days after the flood, Kuiil buried Prabhu in the canyons. He hoped the next time it rained, the best and brightest flowers would grow out of her.

635 days after the flood, Kuiil burned through four emergency batteries to call his clan and make sure they were safe.

642 days after the flood, Kuiil found the Givin family living in Mergo’s cave. No one knew what happened to the Duros.

648 days after the flood, a slipshod mercenary team arrived. Kuiil advised them to ride across the canyons on blurrgs and they laughed him off before racing off on speeder bikes.

650 days later, Kuiil found their bodies in a pile outside the complex. Too many to bury at once, he put them in the canyons and piled rocks over them. Kuiil wondered what inside the complex was so valuable.

653 days after the flood, a Zeltron knocked him out with a single kick and stole a blurrg. Kuiil would have given the blurrg to her anyway.

658 days after the flood, a Weequay gang landed. Kuiil told them everything he knew about the complex and sent them off with plenty of water. The stolen blurrg returned. Her rider did not.

663 days after the flood, Mergo and the Givins showed up to Kuiil’s home to trade most of their belongings for two blurrgs. They were moving because the endless influx of bounty hunters was becoming dangerous and asked Kuiil to come with them. He refused.

The desert of Arvala-7 grew emptier and emptier, and the bounty hunters grew more and more strange.

681 days after the flood, a ship hovered 10 meters above the ground. On the open ramp, a tall figure with their arms bound and a bag over their head struggled against five smaller figures. The tall one freed their arms and grabbed two people by the neck. The others pulled them away and pushed the tall one off the ramp. They fell with a clang, stood up, and took the bag off, revealing signature red optics of an assassin clone. Kuiil was too far to determine their exact strain and model, and didn’t want to get closer. The clone walked over the edge of the canyon, fell in, and continued walking. He followed the clone, watching as they slowly meandered along the canyon walls, flatly refusing all help. When faced with a dead end, the clone leapt three meters into the air, landing above the canyons. Kuiil asked the clone why they didn’t do that more often. The clone replied, “I must conserve energy.” walked straight ahead, and immediately fell back into the canyons. Kuiil stopped following them after seven hours, during which they traveled the total distance a blurrg could in 40 minutes. 

683 days after the flood, a real bantha-footed blunderer of a Mandalorian showed up, landed his maltreated relic of a ship right in the middle of the Jawas’ sandcrawler’s usual path, and immediately got mauled by a feral blurrg. Kuiil rescued him. He was readily willing to accept his advice in riding a blurrg across the canyons, which was a good sign. Not only that, he had tamed the feral blurrg through friendship in a single afternoon, trained it in one day, and learned to ride it by the end of three days. He was an interesting man. The Mandalorian would always receive meals and advice with the greatest of thanks, but at the same time, he would always eat alone in his ship where Kuiil couldn’t see how much the Mandalorian enjoyed his cooking, and he would always do the exact opposite of Kuiil’s advice at least once to disastrous result, as if testing his wisdom. Kuiil hoped he wouldn’t have to bury him.


	3. Intermission: IG-11

Many clones are constructed using super accelerated aging, up to 10 times faster than normal, and any negative effects of these are countered with cybernetics.

Pros: Most clones can be produced in 3-5 years. Different facilities can customise genomes and cybernetic implants to produce a wide variety of clones as opposed to a single strain. 

Cons: Everything else.


End file.
